BTBAM’s Paul Waggoner Ranks the Band’s Seven Albums
What a fun idea for a column: Noisey has a recurring feature called “Rank Your Records” in which they ask a member of a band with a substantial discography to place the band’s albums in order of their personal preference. The bands that’ve been featured are all over the musical map, but a few that might be of interest to MetalSucks readers are Oxbow, Anthrax, Mindless Self Indulgence, NOFX and now, in their most recent post, Between the Buried and Me.
As all BTBAM fans know, the band has changed quite a lot from their beginnings in the hardcore scene to the tripped-out, proggy adventures of today. As such, it’s not surprising to see guitarist Paul Waggoner rank the band’s earlier work lower and later work higher, with their second album The Silent Circus grabbing the 7th spot (and their self-titled debut taking #6) and their newest, Coma Ecliptic, at #1.
7. The Silent Circus
6. Between The Buried And Me
5. Alaska
4. The Great Misdirect
3. Colors
2. The Parallax II: Future Sequence
1. Coma Ecliptic
Paul’s reasoning for his rankings — which he details in the accompanying interview with author Brian Leak — are even more interesting than the rankings themselves, providing a look into the band’s mindset and creative process with each album. Here’s what he had to say about Alaska, echoing a sentiment he expressed when MS scribe Phil Boozeman interviewed him earlier this year:
“Selkies” has obviously always resonated with people. It’s kind of your “Free Bird,” that song people still want to hear live, but I’ve read that you actually hate playing it.
We hate playing it because we’ve played it four million times. It’s not so much that we hate playing it live, we hate practicing it. We hate the idea of playing it more than anything. Like if we’re in the rehearsal space and we’re practicing the set list and “Oh, now we gotta play ‘Selkies’” everybody’s like, “Oh, Jesus, do we really have to play this?” But when you play it live in front of people—like you said, it’s one of the most demanded songs from our fans—there’s a certain instant reward you get from playing it, there’s a renewed energy to it every time because people are so stoked on it. So as much as we’re just tired of it, the fans still dig it, and I totally get it. It was sort of our first attempt at writing an epic-style song with a very linear song structure and the extended guitar solo thing at the end.
Check out the full piece at Noisey.
[via The PRP]
